AppMetrica Blog

User Profiles

17 July 2018, 10:00

AppMetrica recently introduced completely new reports in the interface. Now that beta testing has finished, we'd like to tell you why we added new metrics to the audience analytics and what advantages they offer your team.

All app developers rely on events for gleaning information: they are the main signals that point to the user's behavior in the app. Events tell you which buttons the user clicked or tapped, and which screens they opened. When you look at a chain of events, you get a picture of the user's path through the app — the user session.

But there definitely comes a time when you need to analyze user characteristics, such as gender, age or loyalty category. Or you might need a cross-section of the user's history that shows lifetime statistics in the app, like the number of sessions, the number of purchases, or the revenue that the user has brought to the app.

To make it easier to track all the user attributes and collect app usage history, AppMetrica added User Profiles.

User Profiles

A user profile is a portrait of an individual user with a set of attributes and actual lifetime metrics.

The data showing the user's entire "life" in the app — how often and how much they use the app, and what actions they perform — is collected in one place in an intuitive visual format.

Some of the attributes are collected automatically by AppMetrica (these are the system attributes). But you can gain the most interesting insights from custom profile attributes that you configure yourself based on the app's category and user scenarios.

For game users, you can track completed tutorials, clan membership, the number of game attempts, time spent playing, average score, purchases and advertising views.

For content apps that require a subscription, you have the opportunity to assign the subscription status for every single user and also to extend the user’s profile with data about their preferred content: movies, music, books, video lessons, and so on.

In e-commerce applications, you can create a unique customer profile that includes product preferences, the number of orders, the average check, and more.

Rest assured that privacy policies are respected, and the user profile can never be linked to an actual person.

Session timeline

If you would like to understand what steps drive your users to conversion — or on the contrary, you want to know what obstacles are keeping them away from the shopping cart — take a look at recorded sessions. Now every move they make really is recorded, and you can study any user script.

Your support team also gets an added bonus: crashes and bugs are shown in the user’s timeline, so it's easy to track down the causes that lead to errors in the app.

The list of profiles

All profiles are listed in a table, which is convenient for filtering and selecting the users you are interested in. First off, you can add your own attributes to the main system columns to make the list more informative.

Then you can use segmentation just like in other AppMetrica reports. For example, you can select users with a specific conversion, or specify a search term that was followed by an installation.

Profiles report

This is a general audience report that shows the distribution of users by specifiс attributes, so you can explore the audience in the context of the new metrics:

1. Lifetime metrics for each user group: the number of days since installing, days since the last session, and the total number of sessions (we'll be adding more in the next release).

2. The median value for each dimension, which allows you to assess the health of the app and the attractiveness of a particular group of users.

Summary

With the help of custom attributes, you can segment all users by your own criteria, such as the degree of loyalty or participation in an experiment. The list of profiles is actually like a small CRM for the app owner. It's easy to find the profile of a user who made a purchase — or vice versa, who abandoned their shopping cart — so that you can study their sequence of actions in the app and look at their lifetime metrics. All this information will enrich your awareness of your clients and give you food for thought and analysis — provided that you use your profiles wisely!

Be sure to check the AppMetrica documentation and add the attributes that meet your needs. If you need to connect AppMetrica to your app, register the app and then integrate the appropriate SDK.